


If She'd Known

by DarlaBlack



Series: Scenario: 5 Things [8]
Category: The X-Files
Genre: Angst, Episode: s07e10 Sein Und Zeit, Episode: s07e11 Closure, Episode: s07e15 En Ami, Episode: s07e18 Brand X, F/M, Implied Canon Divergence, Mulder's alleged "brain disease", Season/Series 07, True Love, teensy reference to DeadAlive
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-07
Updated: 2019-08-07
Packaged: 2020-08-10 22:16:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,167
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20142868
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DarlaBlack/pseuds/DarlaBlack
Summary: What if the show had actually dealt with Mulder's brain disease as a Thing (rather than a pointless afterthought that no one really believes in)?





	If She'd Known

**Author's Note:**

> This is actually a very old story that I forgot to cross-post here! It didn't do very well on tumblr, but I think that's because it deals with the idea of the brain disease, which everyone hates (including me). I've done my best to redeem it, or think of how it could have been redeemed, but I fully don't believe it was canon. So this is maybe a "brain disease AU." ;)

**1\. **They have just returned from Los Angeles, where she wooed him with magic and he kissed her while no one was looking on the Santa Monica Pier. He has more magic in mind as he tosses their bags onto the floor of her apartment. He doesn’t think about the thing in his brain that wants to kill him, but it waits. It hums like white noise, omnipresent. He has months, maybe. He is determined to make every moment of his life count. Like now. And now. Right now.

She’s wearing blue. He loves her in blue. He tickles the hem of her shirt, works his fingers under it while she feigns interest in sorting her mail. She is smiling, but pretending not to. It is a game

“Anything good?” He asks.

“I’m pre-approved,” she says, holding up a solicitous credit card envelope.

She drops it to the table when his whole hand slides under her shirt and then his lips are on her neck and then…

And then he is looking up at her. He is looking up because he’s on the floor and she is crying and tugging with one hand at his chest and saying his name over and over and _oh Scully, your hands in my hair can’t heal what’s wrong_, he thinks.

**2.** She is livid. She is enraged. She is pounding her fist into a pillow to keep from losing it all together.

“But _why_, Mulder? Why wouldn’t you _tell_ me?” There are tears, she is so angry. And more tears because she is sad.

“It wouldn’t—I thought…” His eyes are closed and he’s leaning forward with his elbows on his knees. She’s pacing her living room now. They’ve just come from the hospital. “I wanted to wait… so you didn’t have to suffer as long.”

She’s stopped in front of him, fists at her hips, still in her travel clothes. Her blue that he loves. “Jesus _fuck_, Mulder. I’m a _doctor_. I’m your—your _partner_. You need to _tell me_.” And then she is dropping onto her knees and the anger is gone but the tears are not. “You need to tell me,” she says again, quieter this time. She is shoving her face into his neck and grabbing at his shirtsleeves with both hands like she can shake the disease out of him and her sobs are all like little knives in his heart.

She is crying so hard that it makes him cry too, and then he mumbles “I’m sorry” into her hair.

His knees come to the floor, to the outsides of hers, denim against cotton, so he can fold his whole body around hers. She slumps against him. He slumps against the floor. He kisses her. He makes love to her there, right there on her rug between the armchair and the couch. He tells her this is all he’s ever wanted. She asks how long he’s known.

“That this is all I’ve ever wanted?”

She frowns. _Did you only love me because you were dying?_ she wants to ask. She doesn’t. It is too cruel.

**3.** When his mother dies it is too too much. It is a grave omen. It is a future echo of what might come.

Mirrored, then, in his apartment not hers, they come apart in exactly the same fashion only now it is his head at her breast, his coffee table shoved aside, not hers. They come apart and then they come together.

Days later, when he tells her he saw his sister, when he tells her he saw them all in starlight, her face crumples because she doesn’t want to doubt him, but she does. Because she thinks it might be a sign that things are worse.

She has traded blue for black leather.

**4\. **Out of desperation, (a cure for everything, he promises) she follows an enemy and almost loses her life. Now it is Mulder’s turn to be livid. He hovers like a thundercloud. He storms like the sea. He has so little time—he will not spend it without her. How dare she almost take herself away?

_Don’t you understand?_ She wants to scream. _Wouldn’t you do anything? Didn’t you do everything?_

They eye each other across a room so thick with desperation and regret and fear and love and relief and anger and J_esus how could you?_ that they can almost taste it like warm metal.

He nearly reads her mind. He would, but he doesn’t have to.

“I’d never forgive you if you died for me,” he says.

She pushes herself off of her couch and walks to him. “What can we do?” She asks as she lifts her palms to his face. He doesn’t touch her. He can’t. Not yet. But then he does because how can he not? She smells like fresh air and danger. He smells like fearsweat. “I can’t do nothing, Mulder,” she says into his sweater, and his arms come around her.

**5.** Is it a miracle from God or a gift from the devil? Some hellish combination of mad science and corporate greed conspire to rip his lungs to shreds and in doing so, strap him down to a North Carolina hospital bed. Scully is tracking down his other records, his brain scans, when they administer the nicotine or it never would have happened. She’s not there when he is poisoned back to life, but first to death. She never would have left him but… His heart stops for a moment. For a moment he is dead. A moment. Then a minute. A full minute. And then it beats again.

When he is alive (_You act like you’re surprised._) his death seems to have cured his other death. Deaths? There are no more beetles. There are no more dark gray tendrils in his brain. Something miraculous (devilish, impossible, nefarious) has happened. What disease is cured by death? What monster would design such a thing?

He is dead-alive. But mostly he is alive. He lives to go back to L.A., to see this stupid movie, to tumble already half naked into the hotel sheets with his love, tipsy on Champagne.

They are suddenly so present, so perfectly aligned with the universe and each other, they are bursting. They are swollen with life and promise. Her fingers are always always in his hair. “Your beautiful brain, Mulder,” she says.

He sighs, dramatic. “You only love me for my brains,” he says. He is lying on his side, naked now, trailing a hand along the skin of her back. She laughs, rolls over, pulls him on top of her: red hair on the pillow, tiny cold toes on his thighs.

“Show me what else you’ve got, then,” she says, and he pulls her hips toward him.

He has his whole life, he thinks.

-end-

I’ll leave it up to y’all what happens next but _psst_ I’ll give you a hint, he doesn’t go to Oregon the second time 😉😘


End file.
